Antigone

Antigone was born into the doomed house of Labdacus. Her father Oedipus had won the throne of Thebes by answering the riddle of the Sphinx and marrying the widowed queen, not knowing she was his mother. In Euripides's Phoenissae, Jocasta names their four children: Eteocles, Polynices, Ismene, and Antigone, the elder daughter. Apollodorus gives the same four. When the truth came out, Oedipus blinded himself and left Thebes. Sophocles's Oedipus at Colonus opens with the blind king calling on Antigone to tell him where they have come. He says she has been his guide ever since she was grown, often hungry and barefoot in the wild. At Colonus near Athens she persuades her father to hear her brother Polynices. She then begs Polynices to turn his army back from Thebes. He refuses, and asks his sisters to give him burial if their father's curse comes true. After Oedipus dies, Antigone asks to be sent home to Thebes to stop her brothers killing each other. They die by each other's hands in the war told in Seven Against Thebes.

Sophocles's Antigone begins the morning after the battle. Creon, now king, has ordered that Eteocles be buried with honor and Polynices left for the birds and dogs. The penalty is death. Antigone asks her sister Ismene to help and is refused. She scatters dust on the body alone. When the guards clear it away, she returns, pours three libations, and is caught. Before Creon she defends herself with the play's most quoted argument. His edict did not come from Zeus, she says, and no mortal decree can override the unwritten laws of the gods. Creon sentences her to be walled up alive in a rocky vault, left to pray to Hades, the only god she honors. His son Haemon, her betrothed, warns that the city quietly praises her. The seer Tiresias then tells Creon that the Furies lie in wait for him for keeping a corpse from the gods below.

Creon gives in too late. As he hurries off, the chorus calls on Dionysus, the god of Thebes, to come and heal the city. Creon buries Polynices first, then opens the tomb to find Antigone hanged in a linen noose. Haemon, clinging to her body, lunges at his father with his sword, misses, and kills himself. Creon's wife Eurydice then takes her own life, cursing her husband. The play's last lines warn that the great words of proud men are repaid with great blows, a closing judgment on Creon's hubris rather than on Antigone.

The ancient accounts do not agree on how Antigone's story ended. Aeschylus's Seven Against Thebes closes with a herald announcing that Polynices must lie unburied, and Antigone answering that she will bury him herself. The chorus splits in two, half following her. Many scholars have argued that this final scene was added to the play after Aeschylus's death, and the debate is not settled. Euripides's Phoenissae tells the story differently again. There Oedipus is still in Thebes when his sons die. Creon forbids Polynices's burial and orders Antigone to marry Haemon. She threatens to kill Haemon on the wedding night like a Danaid bride, and chooses exile as her blind father's guide instead. Oedipus recalls an oracle of Apollo that he will die at Colonus near Athens. In her last lines Antigone still vows to bury her brother secretly, even at the cost of her life, yet leaves Thebes with her father.

Euripides also wrote an Antigone, now lost except for fragments. An ancient summary attached to Sophocles's play reports that in Euripides's version she was caught together with Haemon, given to him in marriage, and bore a son, Maion. Hyginus's Fabulae tells a darker tale. Antigone and Polynices's widow Argia secretly place his body on Eteocles's pyre. Creon hands Antigone to Haemon to be killed, but Haemon hides her among shepherds. Years later their son comes to Thebes for the games. Creon recognizes him by the birthmark shared by all descendants of the dragon's teeth sown by Cadmus. Heracles pleads for mercy, but Creon refuses, and Haemon kills Antigone and himself. Pausanias saw a spot near Thebes that locals called the Dragging of Antigone. There, they said, she hauled her brother's body onto Eteocles's burning pyre because she could not lift it.

Antigone became one of the most discussed figures in European thought. Hegel took the clash between Antigone and Creon as his model of tragedy: two ethical claims, the family and the state, each justified and each one-sided. In occupied Paris, Jean Anouilh's Antigone opened at the Théâtre de l'Atelier in February 1944, staged under Nazi censorship. Bertolt Brecht adapted Friedrich Hölderlin's German translation of Sophocles. His version was first performed in Chur, Switzerland, in 1948, with Helene Weigel as Antigone. The play's central question, whether a law of the state can bind against the claims of the underworld and the gods, keeps it in constant modern performance.